Perceived Stress, Gratitude and Altruism among Indian Young Adults and Middle-Aged Adults during Covid-19 Pandemic

Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic has profoundly altered our lives; it has produced both negative and positive impacts on people’s lives. This pandemic has taught us about how not to take even a small thing for granted, it has taught us the value of life and how to be grateful for everything in life. Likewise, pandemic also taught us about how to selflessly care for someone, being altruistic is the need of the hour. Many people went out of the way to help others, this shows how much we as humans have changed. Therefore, the current paper aims to study the Perceived stress, Gratitude, and Altruism among Indian young adults and middle-aged adults during the Covid-19 Pandemic. The study includes a sample of four hundred twenty-eight participants; two hundred forty-six young adults and one hundred eight two middle-aged adults were recruited. Due to the pandemic, all the data was collected through online postings on various applications. Three tools were used in the study; Perceived stress scale (PSS) developed by Cohen and Williamson (1988) to measure the perceived stress of the sample, The Gratitude Questionnaire (GQ-6) developed by McCullough et al. (2002) to assess the gratitude of the sample and Generative Altruism Scale (GALS) developed by Bussing et al. (2013) to measure the altruism of the sample. For statistical analysis, a t test was used to compare the means of the sample and Pearson correlation was used to measure the correlation between the variables. The results suggested that there is no significant difference in perceived stress among young adults and middle-aged adults, likewise, no significant difference was found in altruism among the sample, whereas, a significant difference was found in gratitude between the sample. This research also attempts to study the correlation between the variables; perceived stress, gratitude, and altruism. Correlation came out to be positive for all the variables, which means if perceived stress increases, gratitude, and altruism also increase, likewise, if gratitude increases altruism also increases. It can be seen in the study how increased stress led to increased pro-social behavior. More research needs to be done in the field, as a lack of reviews were seen in the study.